FindAnyFilm.com steers UK users away from pirated content

The UK Film Council has launched a new website that it hopes will steer …

In an attempt to steer Internet users' attention away from P2P and toward legal movie options, the UK Film Council has launched a new site called FindAnyFilm.com. The website searches across all kinds of media—from theater showings to DVD to online streams to digital downloads—in order to present users with as many legal ways to watch a particular movie as possible. And, although the Film Council is dripping with overly-positive praise for its own product, the site is actually pretty useful, as long as the movies are actually available in any of those formats.

"Film fans' lives have just been revolutionised," says the UK Film Council, with the launch of the "ground-breaking" FindAnyFilm.com. The site contains film records for some 30,000 movies—approximately seven years' worth of films—and is apparently expanding on a daily basis. The site allows users to search by various genres, moods, locations, or keywords, and can even find films in 60 different languages.

A quick spin through the site shows that it does indeed have some handy functionality, at least if you're looking for fairly recent, popular movies. For example, searching for Dark Knight brought up a page with an embedded trailer, a description of the movie, and then links for where to find it in the cinema, on TV, on DVD, on Blu-ray, to download, and to watch online.

When you click on one of those links—I chose "To Download"—the next page lists where and how to get those items. For the download section, it even has checkboxes for Mac and PC (just in case it's available on one of those obnoxious one-platform-only formats), and offers listings for both rent and purchase.

If your movie is only available in some formats and not others, the page will allow you to sign up for e-mail alerts for when it becomes available in your desired format. The Film Council thinks it's pretty clever for coming up with this idea (which, don't get us wrong, is definitely a helpful feature). "Film lovers will be particularly drawn to the 'Alert Me' feature which will automatically alert them as soon as their chosen film, no matter how obscure, becomes available in the UK in their chosen format," the council said in a statement. "So if their favourite film is ever shown at the cinema again or becomes available to download - they will be the first to know about it."

There are two problems with FindAnyFilm, both of which are fairly obvious. The first is that, despite having film records for 30,000 movies, many of those records don't contain much. Many of the older or more obscure films I searched for turned up search results, but they merely told me that I could get those movies on DVD (or find them on TV)—not exactly the kind of result I was looking for.

So, there's the problem of limited content combined with users being somewhat misled by the seemingly large number of results. FindAnyFilm does offer an advanced search, but there's no way to filter for exactly the type of media you're looking for. It would be very useful to add a drop-down or a series of checkboxes that would let me limit my searches to streams and downloads, for example, and leave out results that are only available in arcane formats that I'm not interested in.

The other problem is that, for now, FindAnyFilm is only available for the UK. While users from other parts of the world can use the site, the cinema and TV listings are aimed at the UK audience, and links to streaming and download options are to the UK versions, which may or may not block outsiders from accessing them (depending on the film and who's offering it). To be honest, I wish something like this would be launched for US Internet users. Though it may not deter P2P users from hitting their favorite torrent sites, it would certainly make finding movies (and, in an ideal world filled with fairies and unicorns, maybe even TV shows) easy and convenient.